Meg Myers Speaks a Cold and Distant Truth

Meg Myers, TZIA

I needed longer than usual to embrace Meg Myers’ third LP-length album, not because of the music, but because of her amended image. Her previous albums foregrounded her beauty, but in ways that subverted White Euro-American standards. Her redesign into a strange, Star Trek-like dominatrix, seemed too abrupt. Then somebody reminded me of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album, with its body horror-influenced art, and I finally glimpsed Myers’ intent.

Like Bowie, Myers has apparently decided to periodically reinvent herself to ensure that she, and her audience, never become complacent. This new image accompanies Myers’ rejection of the “Big Sad” character she’s previously played. This album contains several songs explicitly declaring how she’s no longer beholden to the demons from her past. Which is personally empowering, sure; but as art, this album feels more like a TED Talk than music.

Several tracks have lyrics so declarative, I can only call them thesis statements. Lines like “I know the truth is inside of me, I hold the key” (from “A New Society”) or “A call for all the people, Who stand for what is right, From different places, We all unite” (from “Sophia <144>”) bespeak the energy Myers wants to convey. She’s no longer content describing her pains from a personal, introspective angle. She’d rather unify listeners in rebellion against the conditions that made those pains possible.

This puts me, the listener, in an awkward position. I respect the hippie-esque protest anthem motivation. Pop music has a long history of demanding the world do better, that it show more respect to those most abused by our culture and economy. Many of these songs, written in a very square 4/4 time, are perfect for marching on public squares and national monuments. Myers clearly wants to create a pop-art manifesto for a post-Me-Too world.

Yet something feels missing. Most tracks have a synth-driven background with a programmed percussion track—the personnel list names a human drummer on only two songs. This results in hypnotic, looping rhythms on most songs, like a heavier ‘Hearts of Space” trance. Looking back on classic protest songs, like “Peace Train” or “Fortunate Son,” these songs shared an important quality: audiences could sing along. That’s far harder here.

Meg Myers

Myers’ thesis statements are well-grounded, mostly. She decries the ways culture moralistically controls women’s sexuality, while ironically foregrounding sex, with lines like “Victimized, I’ve been tied to bedposts” (from “Me”). She excoriates the ways women, including herself, manage men’s emotions for so long that they become deaf to their own needs, in “My Mirror.” The song “Searching For the Truth” begins with the self-explanatory lines:

Everybody’s hiding from their fears
Spinning in their cycles all alone
With a hand over one eye
Disconnected pieces of a whole

I appreciate these messages, which would arguably make good stump speeches. But since Myers tells us how to receive her songs directly in the lyrics, and we’d struggle to sing along with her trance-inducing rhythms, I struggle to understand why she wrote them as songs. She isn’t inviting us listeners on a journey, she’s lecturing to us based on her hard-won experience. Basically she’s channeling her inner indie-pop Rebecca Solnit.

As a result, this album’s most intensely felt song is probably the only one she didn’t co-write. When I saw the title “Numb” on the track listing, I assumed she’d re-recorded her own song of the same title. Nope, she’s covered Linkin Park’s icky 2003 hate-lust anthem, possibly on a dare. Her understated arrangement here serves her message, as a synth drone and Myers herself on harp create a disconnected, ethereal soundscape. The collision with the original version is palpable.

In the decade since her first EP, Myers has reinvented herself constantly. Among other things, she’s shaved her head after each album tour. She’s given conflicting reviews of her earliest recordings, sometimes claiming she was constrained and controlled, other times claiming her collaborations with Andrew Rosen and Atlantic Records brought her to technical musical maturity. Maybe that explains this album’s line: “It’s time to give yourself all of the love you’ve been missing.”

Despite what I’ve said, this album does have admirable songs. Tracks like “Bluebird” and “Waste of Confetti” stop the lecturing tone and instead invite listeners on Myers’ unique journey. But they don’t come together to create an album the way her previous two LPs did. Perhaps this is a transitional album. I’ve previously felt drawn to Meg Myers’ personal, confessional lyric style. Sadly, it feels she’s now holding us at arm’s length.

New Millennial Pop-Folk Blues

Sharon Van Etten, Remind Me Tomorrow

“Sitting at the bar, I told you everything,” Sharon Van Etten sings mournfully to open this album. “You said ‘Holy shit. You almost died.’” Van Etten doesn’t much explain what “everything” means in this song, “I Told You Everything.” But it clearly involves a youthful sexual experience that leaves her shaken and scarred, yet, she implies, compelled to eternally repeat. That sets this album’s mingled themes of dread and disappointment.

If, like me, you encountered this album through its advance singles, particularly “Comeback Kid” and “Seventeen,” you probably anticipated these themes. Heavy with melancholy and a sense of mortality, these songs reflect an artist who, thirty-seven years old when she recorded them, recognized an unmet need for pop music with a grown-up audience. But they don’t really reflect the album’s larger soundscape, which is unremittingly grim, verging on bleak.

Previously noted for a substantially acoustic singer-songwriter sound, Van Etten’s fifth album shifts to an atmospheric electronica sound notable for its minimal guitars. And by “atmospheric,” I mean a minor-key bass chord on Farfisa organ runs through nearly this entire album, making your teeth vibrate like a 1980s horror movie soundtrack. This chord is so understated, though, that you may only notice its persistence on the fourth or fifth listen.

Yet this isn’t a horrific album. Sad and pensive, perhaps, often preoccupied with the past despite the pressing imminence of the present, but the only scary thing is how we interpret it. I noticed this on “Jupiter 4,” which has lyrics of unalloyed love—”Our love’s for real, how’d it take a long, long time to let us feel?”—played ironically against chords that sound like a breakup song.

Put another way, Van Etten does the opposite of Hank Williams, who often played gloomy lyrics against bouncy tunes. Van Etten, like Williams, puts her words and music in direct opposition. Listening to this album, you may feel a growing sense of dread. Not only that somber chord, but Van Etten’s contralto voice, which contrasts with the music but doesn’t oppose it. Her voice seems separate from the instrumentation.

Sharon Van Etten

This has good and bad qualities. This album’s first three tracks are so uniform in sound and tempo that, if you’re listening with half an ear while driving or studying, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s one fourteen-minute song. Only with “Comeback Kid” does the sound become differentiated enough to feel a change. This is also where Van Etten’s vocals become distinct enough to follow without a lyrics sheet.

After that point, however, everything opens up. Her dynamic changes, and her voice becomes a more prominent instrument. Though still atmospheric and dense, she becomes more willing to step up or fade back, appropriate to the message she conveys. Yet she never loses that reverse-Hank Williams trick, because her songs remain sonically stark, regardless of how optimistic or despondent her words.

Please understand, this isn’t a timeless sound. My previous reference to 1980s soundtrack music isn’t flippant. Her foregrounding of Farfisa or synthesizer on every track harkens back to the music that dominated the soundscape of Van Etten’s childhood. As the oldest Millennials approach forty, but frequently still can’t afford a down-payment on a house, this lingering backwards gaze will touch their situation concisely.

Hearing this album as a unit, one wonders whether Van Etten intended it to announce her planned retirement. The single “Seventeen,” with its themes of generational angst, became her first to hit any Billboard chart. Like most Millennials, she both is and isn’t an adult, with all the responsibilities of a career and new motherhood, but a paucity of trust from her economy. One suspects she’s touched a nerve.

Motherhood in particular lingers throughout this album, though usually not overtly. On the final track, “Stay,” she muses, “Imagining when you’re inside, when you make those kicks inside. Don’t want to hurt you. Don’t want to run away from myself.” The prospect of caring for a helpless life, when her generation frequently can’t care for itself, scares her. But, she continues, “You won’t let me go astray.” Adulthood persists, regardless.

Pop music often requires artists to remain eternally teenaged and rebellious, because kids have more disposable income. But Van Etten’s compositions reflect a generation that never had economic stability enough to rebel, and now faces impending middle age. I find a kindred spirit in her: grown-up, yet still carrying the unfulfilled impulses of youth. This album starts slowly, sure. But by the end, it’s pop for a newly older generation.

Folk Circuit Foot Soldiers

1001 Albums To Listen To Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part Five
Wolfstone, Year of the Dog

Now that the Celtic folk music revival of the 1990s is barely remembered, it’s hard to comprehend that people ever argued whether the Pogues or the Chieftains, the Waterboys or Loreena McKennitt, was the superior artist. Contemporary or traditional? Electric or acoustic? Into this verbal jousting came Wolfstone, a band from Inverness, whose name reflected an undiluted mixture of traditional and rock elements similar to, but quite unlike, anything that came before. Or, unfortunately, since.

This was the band’s fifth album—though they disavowed their first two releases, making this their actual third. With this recording, they finally made the complete jump from a dancehall band to an actual mass-media presence. By formally consolidating their drummer and abandoning sequenced loops, they shed their former recordings’ late-Eighties sound, fully incorporating the crashing, organic sound of wood striking goatskin. With their embrace of full band, but rejection of Riverdance niceness, they peaked.

Wolfstone had a continually rotating membership; they exhausted more drummers than Spinal Tap. However, their best work centered on a quartet of guitarist Ivan Drever, fiddler Duncan Chisholm, guitarist Stuart Eaglesham, and his brother, keyboardist Struan Eaglesham. Drever also wrote most of their best songs, some with Chisolm. Their mix of acoustic and electric instruments, melding folk and rock styles, creates an integrated sound that, rather than blending two styles, creates one their wholly own.

Saying they have “rock stylings” could be misleading. Some of their tracks show influences of late-Eighties commercial hard rock, driven by percussive chords and a synthesizer foundation. Others have a quieter, more atmospheric edge reminiscent of acts like the Cocteau Twins or Dream Academy. Either way, their sound was already displaced, a heritage structure that belonged to a prior time. Like the folk music they liberally sampled, their rock was a holdover from another era.

The band’s fondness for circular rhythms and percussive backbeats reflect its heritage, paying its dues on the “Highlands and Islands” dance-hall circuit. Though their lyrical content ranges from Scottish history to America’s present to Norse mythology, they remain rooted to a sound designed for dancing. Their clear, synth-driven chord progressions and sing-along choruses cut audibly through surrounding noise; even this decades-old recording sounds piercing enough for house parties and driving around with the windows down.

Guitarist Duncan Chisholm and fiddler Ivan Drever
playing live at Wolfstone's mid-1990s peak

Beyond a doubt, this is a political album. It opens with a track, “Holy Ground,” about the suffering caused by violence in Northern Ireland. They also include “Brave Foot Soldiers,” about the struggle for Scottish independence, and “Braes of Sutherland,” a lament by a Scotsman evicted from his homeland during the Foreclosures. Only one song, “The Sea King,” doesn’t have political themes. Loosely adapted from an Orkney folk poem, it eulogizes a fallen islands conquerer.

American audiences will particularly appreciate the song “White Gown,” about one’s refusal to bow before racism and bigotry. Purportedly, Wolfstone, who enjoyed a semi-permanent status on America’s folk festival circuit in the early 1990s, discovered they had played a concert within driving distance of a Klan rally. Horrified, they wrote a song about standing straight and unbroken, even unto death. With the newly visible resurgence of organized bigotry in America, this couldn’t be more timely.

Besides the five songs, this album also includes four instrumental medleys. All four mix traditional folk melodies with original compositions, though the original tunes, composed by the band’s instrumentalists, have distinctly traditional roots. These are essentially dance-hall folk tunes bolstered with an electronic backbeat, permitting either Riverdance-ish traditional jigs or more contemporary, unplanned dancing. The closing track, “Dinners Set,” particularly resembles the theme for some revisionist fantasy epic, ending the album on a high note.

Don’t mistake this album for something new. Recorded when the Internet barely existed, in a studio that maxed out at sixteen tracks, and sold primarily by mail-order and merch table, this album belongs securely in its time. In the hangover from the Reagan-Thatcher generation, Wolfstone, like other bands of their times, had a squeaky-clean sound and earnest lyrical thrust that squarely reflect their era. Despite politically charged hard edges, this album remains aggressively, soberly nice.

Sadly, this album and its follow-up, The Half Tail, about northern Scotland’s continuing economic decline, saw the band at its peak. After this, Wolfstone struggled to clear its contractual obligations, while two members of its central quartet left to pursue side projects. They cranked out two sub-par albums and a best-of collection before going into hiatus. Currently, a ghost of Wolfstone tours Scotland, occasionally self-releasing albums. Like the Beatles, this sound belongs to its time.

Funeral Mass in the Key of Bowie

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 2
David Bowie, Blackstar

It takes four minutes into this album’s title track before the beat drops. Think about that: the first song’s slow, lingering intro outlasts most Top-40 teenybopper singles. Throughout, the syncopated backbeat contrasts with a droning main line, a complete reversal of the usual pop composition structure. This serves two purposes: it presages the entire album’s contemplative, dirge-like structure. And it dares half-committed listeners to trust the artist or piss off.

Not that those four minutes are wasted white noise. Bowie sings, in a manner reminiscent of Gregorian chant, about a strange ritual taking place “In the villa of Orman,” a mythological place where smiling and kneeling go hand-in-hand. The song explains little. But we don’t need much explanation; Bowie sounds clearly like he’s singing somebody’s death knell. No mystery whose. Throughout the album, Bowie is clearly scripting his own upcoming funeral procession.

In the wake of Bowie’s passing, you undoubtedly heard endless repetitions of clips from this album, especially the key images from the video for his track “Lazarus.” You know the one, the images of Bowie lying in a hospital gurney, eyes bandaged, buttons planted like pennies for the boatman. These images, and the sounds accompanying them, are reasonable approximations of this entire album, an exploration of a still-active mind trapped in a slowly failing body.

Like most serious contemporary recording artists, David Bowie often composed recent tracks with one eye oriented toward YouTube. Both advance videos for this album feature that bandaged man. But he exists in different contexts. In “Lazarus,” he’s visibly dying, while ghosts of his past identities, now emaciated and jerky, like withering wind-up men, surround his deathbed. He’s clearly struggling to put his past to rest, and not necessarily succeeding.

The other advance video single, “Blackstar,” features a strange funeral ritual, making explicit what’s only implied in the lyrics (“In the day of execution, only women kneel and smile”). Except the women, who have tails and apparently live under a permanent eclipse, are burying a skeleton in an Apollo astronaut suit. At the far end of his career, Bowie is apparently, at last, giving Major Tom the burial his career-launching single always denied.

Occasional Classic Rock Radio staples like “Space Oddity” or “Changes” notwithstanding, David Bowie’s music, in the main, has never been particularly approachable. He distrusted easy acclaim. Here, too, he buries tracks that could have earned him cheap radio airplay. Tracks like “Girl Loves Me” or “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” which could’ve been Modern Rock chart hits, Bowie chose instead to conceal as deep album cuts. Even dying, he didn’t want mere applause.

Despite shifting tones, and complicated lyrical themes, this album sounds like a piece. The lead instruments throughout appear to be saxophone and electric bass, bolstered by strings (probably on synthesizer) and a guitar so understated, it’s almost not there, giving this album overall a jazz-like sound. Maybe that’s the point. Like Miles Davis, this album has in inscrutable, Miles Davis-like texture that prevents listening with only one ear.

Like Miles, Bowie’s musical epiphanies happen between the notes. Sometimes that involves his explosive lyrics, like on tracks like “’Tis Pity She Was a Whore” or “Sue (or In a Season of Crime),” probably the only two songs where it’s possible to say they’re “about” something. Other lyrics—“Dollar Days” springs most immediately to mind, alongside the two singles—have less an object than a theme, which we uncover only by immersing ourselves in Bowie’s journey.

And what a journey. As “Blackstar” involves planning his own burial, “Sue” implies burying somebody else, a loved one who… what? With the references to x-rays and tests, I thought perhaps she was dying, an impression bolstered by references to kissing her face and pushing her beneath the weeds. But what’s this about having a son and atonement? Is Sue feeling guilty about an abortion? Then I realized, don’t read it linearly. It’s probably about a miscarriage.

That’s consistent with this album’s entire arc. Meaning comes incrementally, and I”m sure I haven’t savvied everything implicit in Bowie’s complicated lyrics. He struggles with imminent mortality, with facing a God he hasn’t pinned down. (Like George Harrison, Bowie’s lifelong spiritual struggle is heavily documented.) Bowie’s lyrics cite “heaven,” “the great I Am,” and other references to a God he doesn’t quite believe in.

This isn’t fun-time party music. It absolutely demands commitment to the journey. But listeners willing to participate will find an album that lingers, that changes your brain slowly, like Bowie, always evolving.

Classical Music for the Modern Ear

Laura Sullivan, Feast of Joy and Love

Okay, honesty time: I cringed inwardly when I saw this album’s opening track featured a medley of Bach’s “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” and “Minuet in G,” two of the most over-performed pieces of Baroque music. They’re usually played in bloodless styles completely lacking Bach’s devotion, especially at weddings. But Laura Sullivan immediately plays “Jesu” by mixing her piano and spare orchestration with an Enya-like wordless chorus that pushes an overplayed piece in new directions.

Following her Grammy Award for her 2013 album Love's River, composer/pianist Laura Sullivan has begun vigorously re-releasing her prior independent New Age albums. But calling her music “New Age” feels dismissive, like comparing it to those studiously inoffensive albums of piano and Hammond organ music my parents played every holiday dinner. Sullivan’s music sounds different, more enterprising, like an attempt to create mature, sophisticated pop for grown-up audiences. Her strangely introspective arrangements succeed well.

Sullivan’s careful orchestration resembles current chamber pop stars like Bon Iver or The Decembrists. But she approaches her sound from the opposite direction: rather than creating Top 40-friendly pop that mines the best baroque sounds, she crafts listenable classical music that incorporates pop breeziness. Her music will sound charmingly familiar to anybody versed in pre-Mozart classical sounds. Not that she limits herself, though. Her uncluttered arrangements include hints of Latin, Celtic, and other world musics.

Besides Bach, Sullivan repurposes works by Beethoven, Albinoni, and the anonymous classic “Greensleeves.” This in addition to her original compositions, which don’t necessarily ascend in the strictly classical manner. Her best works, like the Cape Breton-infused “Shalaelah” or the transnational “Café des Artistes,” have a Philip Glass character, based on recognition of patterns rather than development of themes. Her Greensleeves arrangement exemplifies this effect, carrying motifs from piano to voice and back, frequently in near-harmony.

Piano drives these tracks, which makes an interesting change from many single-artist New Age recordings. Though the notes indicate Sullivan uses digital samples to bolster her acoustic instruments, she doesn’t rely upon synth and electronics to create her music—mercifully enough since that usually only sounds good in garage rock. She supports her music by multi-tracking her vocals (and her husband Eric), sometimes incorporating strings and saxophone for increased richness. But she remains committedly acoustic.

Laura Sullivan

This combination of theme-driven arrangements and spare instrumentation permits Sullivan some moments of surprising clarity. In “Pinot Noir,” for instance, Sullivan cedes lead to saxophonist Noel Jewkes, whose steady jazz progressions overlay Sullivan’s piano and barely audible brushes on percussion. (Sullivan uses some percussion, but mainly lets her left hand establish the groove.) This track is the closest Sullivan comes to out-and-out melancholy, yet she makes it feel like a mere breather on the road.

As the title suggests, Sullivan maintains a primarily positive attitude throughout this album, with works mainly in common and waltz time, with easygoing tempos you could slow-dance or stir-fry to. Nothing sufficiently Bolero-like for risqué business, sorry. But for the preliminaries, for holding hands while watching the sunset or cooking dinner on an open fire, Sullivan’s music provides not just a mindless background, but an actual tempo, a useful and pleasurable groove for shared movement.

In some ways, Laura Sullivan represents what’s possible for musicians who embrace modern technology. Not only does she have creative control enough over her music to create a sound she wants, independent distribution through her private label ensures her personal guidance continues over her work. Like the more mainstream Ani DiFranco, Sullivan has a level of artistic autonomy little seen since early recordings displaced traditional troubadours. Perhaps music has now returned to the originating musicians.

Except, if Sullivan hadn’t solicited this review personally, I might never have discovered her sound. My adolescent prejudices against New Age music would’ve kept me from trying this album even if I’d encountered it somewhere. The means of creating music have devolved to individual musicians, but the means of publicizing remain tenaciously owned by the Big Five media conglomerates. How can musicians assert control over their music, if curious listeners like me never hear them?

Laura Sullivan creates a “lite classical” sound nuanced enough that a part-time snob like me can approach her sound without feeling talked down to. But her spare arrangements and vernacular piano invite pop audiences to participate in her journey too. Her sounds, which range from Gregorian austerity to celebratory sophistication, bring committed listeners on a journey, or if you’d rather listen with half an ear, she buoys your mood. Sullivan wants to restore your soul.

An Ambient Beat for a Modern Heart

Silentaria, What's Real?

Composer Rixa White’s solo electronic extravaganza appears, at first blush, to have much in common with, Vangelis, Jon Anderson’s Yes, and other synthpop veterans. It’s certainly a nostalgic throwback. But Silentaria doesn’t merely mimic thirty-year-old pop icons; it also throws in an aggressive bass line that provides a fuller sound than first-wave synthpop ever enjoyed, bolstered with occasional dance floor rhythms and muscular mixed genre sounds.

On its website, Silentaria bills itself as “the Voice of Emptiness,” presumably in reference to Buddhist meditation techniques. But I’m not sure how well it lives up to that name. I mean that in a good way: this album has a very full, rich sound, making best use of its conventional and programmed instruments. It pushes Eastern pentatonic scales and Western staggered harmonies together in ways that, while not always surprising, are certainly never boring.

Like many such ambient music ensembles, Silentaria is essentially one man, and as much a triumph of engineering as musicality. Rixa White, a software entrepreneur, turned his attention to composing and recording in 2010, and this is his second album. Like those who paved the road he travels (Yanni and Kitaro come to mind), White uses his synthesizer to combine conventional piano composition and a programmed orchestra in a large, theatrical soundscape.

Silentaria’s music relies less on virtuosity and more on pattern recognition, as this style often does. But Silentaria is not satisfied to have its music permeate below the level of conscious recognition, in the best Hearts of Space tradition. Tracks like “Vital Doubts” and “Consciousness” have athletic pacing and driving percussion lines that demand to be heard. Even White’s softer compositions shift tempos and instrumentations enough to keep your attention hooked.

Then, when White has your attention, he upsets your expectations. Tracks like “Curtains Over Eyes” and “Real Fantasia” may sound like ordinary ambient music if you listen with only half an ear, but closer examination reveals unanticipated contrasts. Shakuhachi beneath skirling electric guitars; intricate symphonic orchestrations over pining wordless sighs. White’s compositions reward active listeners with curiosity enough to follow his changes.

Rixa White

White also makes well-considered use of samples. Sounds of weather, children playing, and animals in their habitat crop up at unexpected times, reminiscent of the pioneering work by acts like Mira Calix and Atom Heart. Even the human voices that peek through the wall of electronica come by way of White’s programming. I particularly appreciate that White can synth human voices without using that ubiquitous, tiresome AutoTune flutter we keep hearing everywhere.

And White also isn’t above a certain amount of winking irony. My favorite track, “Sorrowful Truth,” moves with great thoughtfulness, but nothing like the mournful plod the title implies. As it accelerates toward the end, throwing on playful woodwind hooks and humming wordless choir, we start to grasp White’s message: that when sorrow and truth come into competition, only one can triumph. Sorrow may be necessary, but truth is brimming with vitality and might.

I can’t pretend I have no problems with this album. Some of the tracks don’t live up to the high standards White sets himself. “Diversion,” for instance, is undercut by a cheesy beeping descant, an obvious composer’s fingerprint somewhere between a touch-tone phone and R2-D2. And the title track, one of the few with lyrics (and few enough it is), features a growling male voice demanding: “What’s real?” A female voice provides the answer every Beatles fan has already supplied: “Nothing is real.”

But these brief misfires do not set the tone for the entire album. On the whole, we can roll our eyes at such frankly ordinary choices in the odd deep album cut because the rest of the album has the power to carry us through. At least it tries, and tries harder than any five random pop confections. White’s smart orchestration and intricate programming result in a sound that is at once rooted in an electronic tradition, yet not so hidebound that it sounds the same as every other New Age drone we’ve all heard before.

Much ambient music sounds good for one or two tracks, but sticking with the artists over the length of an album can be difficult. As track mounts on track, they often reveal rhythms so unvarying that you could do Pilates with them and never miss a beat. Silentaria, however, has crafted an album that is emphatically not a soundtrack for jogging or vacuuming. Rixa White puts himself through hard changes, and expects you to join him on the journey.